> The technical debt so deep and so normalized that the team has stopped seeing it as debt at all. It's just "how the system works." The chains have become comfortable. You are about to add more.
I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
Anecdote, but it does seem like a lot of younger folks I speak with are exhausted by the dark patterns and dopamine extraction that top-k social media platforms create.
If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
The original internet wasn't about that at all, it was just in limbo while people were figuring out what it was going to be. It wasn't developed or optimized enough to be _anything_.
It will come. The problem is. So will the addictive stuff. The key is going to be real meaningful connection. Social media wasn't about community. Web 2.0 was. In 2005 we were connecting with real people we knew and probably up until 2011-2012 maybe we still were, but I guess friends of friends, colleagues, people in our network. Then it got really bad.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species.
To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature. Social media was actually better when it was about individual ego (Myspace/LiveJournal); as obnoxious as that can be, today everything is worse because of petty tribalism. Most conflicts on social media are inter-tribal, whether it’s racial, political, national, or feuding “stan” culture groups. The worst problems come from groups who organize on platforms like Discord or Kiwi Farms to direct harassment campaigns against perceived enemies (or random “lolcow” victims).
Simple observation of the present world and history will tell you that a platform focused on “collective improvement” will only appeal to a small subset of potential users. Of course such a platform would not be a bad thing. Places like this (such as The WELL) used to be common when the internet was dominated by academics, futurists, and tech enthusiasts. But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
> To me this statement reads as both inaccurate and ignorant of human nature
> But average people are not interested in this kind of platform, and will not participate in good faith in such an environment.
I'm not ignorant of human nature and tribalistic tendencies. The undercurrent of my comment is of an optimistic hope (or cope) that we can move past competitive individual validation programming. I'm aware that it's due to our nature, but also aware that it's exploited by dark patterns and extraction at scale through software.
Thanks for replying. I agree that dark patterns and other psychological manipulation is a problem, I just don’t think it’s necessarily ego-centric in origin any more than gambling. These companies have found very efficient methods to extract attention and money from humans by exploiting their brain’s natural reward functions. I’m not sure what the answer is, because it’s obviously a problem (again just like gambling addiction), but I do support people’s rights to engage in things like gambling.
Since we don’t live in a perfect world, I suppose some regulation of the industry would be fair, just as we mitigate the harms of gambling somewhat through regulation. I just worry about regulation being used as a Trojan horse to stifle political organization and/or open communication about corruption, cronyism, and oppression.
It may be that the future is more small platforms where conflict is limited to in-group conflict rather than global platforms where all of humanity’s disagreements are surfaced and turned into fodder for monetization.
Gambling is a great example. When I say "ego" I really mean the reinforcement of the individual pattern through survival-resource games, power play, or external validation. I'm not using it in the classic psychological way, perse.
Regulation could work, but in my opinion the problem isn't devious mastermind product people attempting to entrap humanity -- it's self entrapment in a recursive way.
Regulators could add red tape and boundaries for what is or isn't kosher or legal, but in the end can prohibition fix systemic integration with addictive technological superagonist of our own creation?
I guess I just don’t see humanity awakening to transcendent egolessness any time in the near future (if ever). Based on my experience, the average person is fairly constrained by their biological reality. We often like to pretend that this isn’t the case, and pretending may work for a while, but eventually sufficient stress causes the illusion to unravel forcefully.
Regulation isn’t perfect; in the best case all it can do is limit the worst harms. It’s still a bad idea to engage in regulated gambling, as you are very likely to lose money. Almost everyone knows this, yet many people do it, and I can’t see that changing any time soon.
> I'd hope the next iteration of social media tools humanity builds are less about reinforcing the individual ego and more about collective improvement, learning, and supporting the health of our species
Do you have a mechanism for this in mind, incentives-wise? I can't see this making money.
I guess the real question is whether a website where you communicate with friends and close ones needs to be a multi-trillion dollar company in the first place... historically most of them have not been worth very much at all.
This is a bit of a silly response on your part. You're not answering the question of WHY people are on FB and not on the little sites like existed 20 years ago before FB. It's called the network effect. You have friends, your friends have friend, those friends have friends. Rather than there being 30 bajillion separate sites representing these friends connections, people go "hey, why not one site with everyone there".
Said little sites may run for a bit and die, and the massive monolith remains, at least until another monolith replaces them.
I'm not sure how that applies here? The argument is that a p2p network will be flooded with bots?
There's a p2p network I use today which doesn't have that problem, probably due to its small size. Meanwhile all the big platforms do — including this one!
Early Facebook was kind of a great mix. It had enough people on it, it was making money, and the advertising was much more reasonable. At the time it really was a place to connect with IRL friends.
It needs enough revenue to fund its operations. And most people won't pay for such a website, so if you want one place where most people you know are, then...
Come on, don't hand wave over the obvious. Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends. It would be extremely realistic to build something that's both free and sustainable with just regular ads, as was done decades before.
(EDIT: to clarify, I don't mean to build an alternative monopoly, I mean to build alternatives that are big enough to survive as a business, and big enough to be useful; A few million users as opposed to the few billions Facebook and Youtube (allegedly) have)
The reason it's hard to imagine such a thing today is because the tech giants have illegally suppressed competition for so long. If Google or Meta were ordered to break up, and Facebook/Youtube forced to try and survive as standalone businesses, all the weaknesses in their products would manifest as actual market consequences, creating opportunity for competitors to win market share. Anybody with basic coding skills or money to invest would be tripping over themselves to build competing products which actually focus on the things people want or need, because consumers will be able to choose the ones they like.
> Think about how much it would actually cost to run a social media website that competes with the big social media on the core product of sharing and communicating with friends.
It would cost tons man. You don't understand the scale these apps operate on at all. Meta has their own data center footprint that rivals AWS or any other cloud company and they had that before AI, and it's not just all to run ads on. On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
> On demand photo and video streaming and storage for free for all of humanity is incredibly expensive.
Maybe you missed my edit? I specifically said not a clone of the monopolies, but a competitor big enough to be a sustainable business. The economics of a monopolist's empire are irrelevant.
> Social media with only millions of users is basically worthless because it won't capture enough of an average person's circle to be useful to them
There's so much wrong with this statement. First of all, I will never meet anywhere near a million people in my lifetime. A regular human being's real social connections won't be anywhere near that big.
But even if it is (or users want to discover/follow random people), it doesn't take a computer science genius to discover how to interoperate between social networking apps. Meta and Google would never do this, but that's because they're anti-competitive monopolists; if you're a startup trying to gain marketshare and win on your product's quality, interop with other networks is a no brainer. We probably don't even need regulation to require interop, as the market will see it as a useful thing to develop on its own.
A $4.99/mo subscription would yield more revenue than Facebook makes in ARPU from all that fancy, creepy, and intrusive ad tech. Paying YouTube to not advertise to you makes it a 10X better experience.
Well, another example comes to mind. Coordinated efforts to preserve the biosphere for all mankind are probably not going to be great for GDP.
We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The "the incentive structure says we should all destroy our brains" thing is just a small aspect of that.
Actually that's probably really good for GDP, just not over the kind of time periods an individual human deals with or cares about.
> We've tied our incentives to a structure which is not in alignment with continued survival. The real question is how can we incentivize ourselves to continue to exist?
The continued survival of individuals or humanity as a whole? The individuals seem to survive OK, and arguably there's nothing that could convince them to prefer the survival of the amorphous group, save for some kind of brainwashing.
Lol, it doesn't have to run for free and servers are really powerful these days (especially if you don't use a slow language). There are other monetisation strategies besides exploiting users for profit.
It doesn't have to run for free, but if you're competing against anyone else running for free you've already lost the game as they suck the air out of the room with the network effect.
Next, text only platforms are nice, but niche on the modern internet. People seem to love multimedia which takes tons of bandwidth/cpu.
Paid for services don't mean spam free either. If it's worth people to pay for, it's worth spammers paying to get in and spam.
Then you have all the questions on what happens if you grow, how do you deal with working with all the laws around the world, how do you deal with other legal issues.
Having a site/service of any size can quickly become an expensive mess.
I hear word that in some countries, the government makes it so that screen time is limited, and algorithms promote educational content. Fortunately we civilized peoples are free of such a brutal oppression ;)
> If agents/AI/bots inadvertently destroy the current incarnation of social media through noise, I think we'll be better for it.
They are going to be (and AI slop already is) so much worse. Once they get ads to work well / seem natural the dark patterns will pop right back up and the money spigot will keep flowing upwards
Seedance 2.0 is about to eat reap the market gap Sora creates. It's truly superior in every way. It felt like Sora was stunted by OpenAI for long, consistent video generation (not to mention the crazy red tape around what you could generate).
My tinfoil pet conspiracy is that the billionaires know AI is going to be fundamentally incompatible with Capitalism and Democracy and are pressing the gas pedal to force us into a state of corp-state run techno-feudalism.
The TL;DR to you can extrapolate from: Nick Land believes that the Catholic church was the only true exemplar of a perfect control mechanism for humanity.
I'm growing pessimistic that this kind of activity + the egregious presidential-level crypto scams will never see justice. What's the path for that, really?
It's not that complicated. Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG, not a useless ditherer like Garland. What a disgraceful tenure he had. If he was going to take so long to bring charges he should have just avoided it. Instead he takes 3 years to bring all these charges which naturally look like election interference and as such are paused until they choke the election away and the new justice department kills all the cases.
Don't elect a geriatric compromise candidate. The current administration's excesses create a massive opportunity for a pendulum swing. It's really not that hard. Hold yourself, your neighbors, your family and your friends accountable for who they vote for. And as tempting as it is, don't give into cynicism. It will take work but change for the better is always possible, and really in America, is far less out of reach than it would often seem.
Doesn't matter whom you elect, at least not as far as righting wrongs. You might prevent more egregious wrongs from happening, but convincing Congress to return to rule of law is impossible when Congress is almost entirely funded by the same powerful interests who chose to put a lunatic in charge.
You're also up against a large population which has been brainwashed, and even if someone deprogrammed is still not intellectually capable of reasoning beyond their own immediate interests. In other words, a democracy where ignorant people can vote is ultimately doomed to look quite like what we have now.
While I broadly agree with this characterization, it is somewhat inaccurate.
> the same powerful interests who chose to put a lunatic in charge.
I don't think this is accurate as a fact of recent history. As I recall, said interests wanted a repeat of Bush v Clinton. While they may have fallen in line since, I think this picture you are painting misses a lot of nuance. The current president was considered a joke up until the votes started coming in. So I think you are painting with an overly broad brush.
Secondly, at a certain point this starts to read like little more than cynicism. What is a suggestion you have, that isn't merely one in the negative? I genuinely sympathize with your perspective, but I'm curious what the subsequent step is then meant to be.
Thirdly, preventing egregious wrongs is pretty important. I don't believe rule of law is permanently out of reach. If your basis for this is the broad brush you painted earlier well then I don't think that actually computes. And I don't think preventing egregious wrongs should be minimized, even if structural issues are a barrier to "righting wrongs" as I believe you correctly put it. Solving those structural issues is a longer discussion, and one predicated on the requirement that there is no longer a "lunatic in charge".
That in of itself, is important. Let's also remember they could have brought the cases earlier. Your comment doesn't really address that, unless you are essentially claiming someone paid off Garland to dither away for 3 years. I gather that is not your claim? Therefore I think you're being overly cynical. As I said, in many ways it's not that complicated.
> Elect a Democrat in 2028 who will nominate a strong AG
Impossible. Democratic Party power is concentrated into a gerontocracy mostly interested in preserving their own wealth/power.
Appeasement and encouragement of status quo will be the result of any Democrat victory.
Of course all this Trump shit is good precedent for them to use similar tactics to line their pockets next time.
Is this supposed to be an intelligent comment? Is your answer to forgo elections ahead of time? You plan for the worst outcome by already accepting it as reality?
Why don't you work on lobbying your grandparents and their vote because I seriously doubt you are equipped for whatever armed conflict you are imagining. Have some dignity. If Americans are so called upon to defend the constitution then so be it, there is no need to prematurely soil your pants about it.
People often in essence say "I think the odds of [the alternate option(s)] are greater than are being represented". It can be helpful to frame it that way, rather than "I will over-react to what I feel is an over-reaction".
I generally agree, but this time his VP isn't going to defect and he's been building ICE into a republican guard loyal only to him, so I think you can't just completely say "well it failed last time so it'll fail again"
Yep, might not have liked a lot of what Mike Pence stood for but he was at least willing to operate with humility. He always took the honest route ecen if you disagreed with his views.
Vance however, I dont see much of that in action. But time will tell. Folks like to think it is a quiet conspiracy but every time you get a glimpse inside workings of government, if feels like they hate each other more than the next guy, regardless of who is in power.
> he was at least willing to operate with humility. He always took the honest route ecen if you disagreed with his views.
eh I'm not really going to agree with you on this. He flinched 1 millimeter away from committing a full coup. That's not really a positive vote, it's just not as negative as it could be.
“It’s not that complicated. Give up your principles for short term house cleaning.”
People with strong political beliefs are going to turn their head to keep their side in power rather than put someone in power that will push policies they are fundamentally against.
Blagojevich was not replaced by a Republican.
At this point presidential elections are won by getting members of the other side to stay home. So encourage young people to get out and vote if you want a Democrat. Don’t waste your breath telling someone who cares about gun rights to vote for a Democrat.
What kind of reply is that? Nevermind the questionable style of making up a sentence and putting it in quotation marks, what about the comment you're replying to suggests giving up any principles?
You cannot vote for someone in a representative democracy that will enact things against your principles. Voting Democrat, regardless of the quality of character of the representative, would be a betrayal of principles for the people who believe things like “abortion is murder”.
The made up quotation is a style designed to illustrate how dumb of a suggestion that is to people who vote on single issues.
It’s how single issue voters think regardless of Democrat/Republican. They ignore the representative’s moral failings and pick the one that will execute their policy desires.
Why are you appending a sentence I never said within your quote of my position?
Your comment reads like you are arguing with yourself. I never suggested anything to the contrary of much of what you write, so frankly I have no idea what point you are trying to make. I suggest you re-read my comment in full as I think we are predominantly in agreement.
You suggested voting for a Democrat, which would be a ridiculous betrayal to any single issue voter Republican voting for something like stopping abortion because they think it’s murder.
It’s so ridiculous on its face that I put in quotes what would be running through any single-issue voter’s head when they would hear a suggestion to vote for a different policy platform to oust a representative. You might as well ask a Bernie supporter to vote in Ron Paul.
I wasn't talking to single issue republicans... I didn't take the OP to be one, and I (like you) would not waste much time on one.
The point I was trying to make is Democrats can elect and nominate better candidates. But let's also not forget, single issue Republicans are not the only problem.
Institutional or single issue Democrats are also the problem. The biggest problem with Democrats is the DNC. The same people who lied to you about Biden's fitness for a second term are by and large still there. They still want your money. The DNC uses the Trump fear to escape accountability for its failures at every turn. The losers who have lost to this man for about a decade now are still there.
So I think we are in agreement, but I would add the reason more young people and independents need to vote is to replace the power structure on both sides of the aisle, not merely the one in power today. This is not "both sides", rather two things can be true. An institutional Democrat can be better than what we have today, but I think history has shown in the long run it is not good enough. What comes after this from the right in the near future may be far worse. Do not underestimate the ability for a future nominee to make the current president look like a saint... recall when people thought Bush II was a low point. It can happen again. If we keep electing mediocre Democrats, I believe it will.
Thank you for clarifying your comment, I appreciate you coming back to do that.
I think it's likely that they'll see justice in a chaotic way, ie not connected to the specific crime. Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled. Another likely outcome is that they get in the habit of doing criminal things that piss people off, piss the wrong person off, and then get offed.
There was an AskHistorians post about the French revolution a few years ago that really stuck with me:
> Stability had hardly been a hallmark of the Revolution til that point, and really what we have seen is a revolving door of men rising to the summit of power, only to realize that once your head is above the rest it's a prime target for the guillotine. Of the early years of the Revolution, virtually any man who had been considered a leader was either dead or in exile. The King was executed in January of 1793. The Girondin, formerly indistinguishable from the 'left,' went en masse to the guillotine in October 1793. Danton & friends (dubbed by Robespierre 'the indulgents'), the literal authors of the Insurrection of August 10th which overthrew the King and declared the Republic, the 'giant of the Revolution,' had been executed in April 1794. Interspersed with these prominent deaths were hundreds of individuals who had been important players in the Revolution, whether in national or local politics, and who had now paid the price for their notoriety
In times of crisis and scarcity, the usual outcome is that anyone whose ego is big enough to think that he can lead or profit finds that they become a target for elimination. The folks who survive are the ones who focus on, well, surviving. We're headed for one of those times of crisis now, though most people don't want to admit it, and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks.
> Most likely outcome is that they make huge paper profits that are then absolutely worthless because the dollar collapses
Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
But I also don't see the dollar collapsing any time soon. The dollar's strength is built on the US economy, and the US economy is still one of the strongest in the world, with high productivity per person. We'll see some inflation, sure, but nothing that the rich insider traders can't hedge against.
I do not expect that there will be any real justice here. They're not gutting the average American -- they're bleeding us, extracting a small enough amount of value that they can get away with it. And we don't live in a just world.
I think this is a big part of both the impact of globalization and the U.S's waning power. Back around 1950, right after WW2, the "first world" (the developed west, not including Russia or Warsaw Pact countries) had a total population of just over 500M, and the U.S. was 150M of those, just under 1/3. And the remainder were largely dependent upon U.S. capital, machinery, and technology, having just bombed each other back to pre-industrial times.
Today, the developed world is about 3-4B people, and the U.S. is 350M of them, less than 10%. China alone has lifted about 500M people out of poverty and into the middle class in the last 2 decades, a population larger than the total population of the middle class in the U.S. The population of Asia is around 4.86B, 15x the size of the United States, and an increasingly large number of them are living a lifestyle close to what Americans enjoy.
>Seems like it'd be pretty easy to diversify into inflation-protected assets after taking big profits.
Assets are yours only as long as there's a government to enforce your ownership rights over those assets for you. In case of government or societal collapse, your physical assets then are free for the taking to the ones with the most men with the most guns, and your paper assets are worthless.
I believe the dollars strength is built on its unassailability as the petrodollar and foreign reserve currency, which lets the fed set interest rates and print money while creating less inflation than any other currency. The world looks very very different when energy markets aren’t fulfilled in dollars in ways that most citizens won’t understand.
That’s false. The petrodollar is irrelevant because two non-US companies trading using an intermediate currency like the USD create a balanced buy and sell of the intermediary.
But why is Iran insisting the Chinese Yuan be used? Because they're idiots?
Because Petrodollars make our global economy work, and Iran wants their partner China to be in control! If Americans lose sight of their need to maintain their role as *THE* lingua franca of international trade, then all hell is lost. The US cannot afford its military without massive consequences if it can't raise extraordinarily cheap debt through purchases of oil in US dollars immediately turned around to buy US debt to maintain that money's value.
Hidden profiteering off ill-gotten gains happens continously. In some areas it becomes more known or suspected, but because beheadings and such are very far outside the Overton Window that is mostly controlled by the media, the focus of society moves on as the media directs.
> and a lot of the people who are profiting off ill-gotten gains now may find that they don't live to enjoy it simply because it gives them a taste for profiteering that eventually makes them take stupid risks
They believe, rightly or not that they can withdraw from the world with their wealth more or less in one piece to some kind of safe zone.
> because the dollar collapses and the property rights that enforce the wealth they gained from these transactions disappear as the government is toppled.
sorry but this is such a coping mechanism, or doomsday talking. Neither is dollar collapsing nor US government is collapsing, as there has been no evidence whatsoever of any of that even moving towards happening, at least on any meaningfully predictable timescale (i.e. 3-5 years? while even that's rich for predictions). Anything past that is just broken clock being correct.. at some point in time.
What would it take for dollar to "collapse"? What are the exact mechanisms that would be required to start that process?
What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place? It's the kind of thing preppers like to dream of but it's not happpening in our lifetimes.
When things of that scale happen you see it YEARS in advance in true poverty (as in people starving), in anger (as in people getting increasingly violent) at scale, in mass mobilization of masses actually looking to topple the government. Nobody is working right now to overthrow US government, there were never any organized attempts at that, not even demonstrations of a vector that can once lead there, as in it's simply not happening (sorry you can't in all seriousness put Jan 6 there as that was shocking for US political PR, but shockingly irrelevant for any country that has gone through real upheaval). US is extraordinarily rich even in it's poor version, everyone has everything to lose and nothing meaningful to gain from any "revolution".
> What is the evidence of US government being "toppled" with layers and layers and layers of diverse (financial, legal, military, political, social, you name it) protections in place?
I mean.
Do you read the news?
these protections are not working very well these days. the administration is getting away with _so much_ criminality in plain view.
It looks exceedingly likely Trump will try very hard to hold onto power past 2028.
There’s a good chance whatever that looks like leads to some kind of civil unrest at minimum, civil war not off the table.
I’d say it’s 50/50 the US as it currently exists and exerts military and financial might around the world doesn’t by 2029
As someone in their mid 30's who followed Ron Paul back in the early 2000's, I have a hard time understanding this sentiment when, at least back then, "Your rights end where mine begin" was their foundation.
Idk, I don't have any loyalty towards any of these political parties so it shouldn't bother me but part of me gets defensive when I hear them described this way today. (Hell, I remember being the weirdo anti-interventionist in my circles and it was always the tea party ass hats that were uncomfortably enthusiastic about offing people they didn't like).
We particularly need a momentary repeal of double jeopardy to get justice for Epsteins victims. I don't care what the implications are, or the precedent. What he did was unprecedented. Retry gelane on rape and espionage, invalidate the non prosecution agreement for the 25 co conspirators, and convict Jeffrey in absentia in case he ever turns up.
Revolution, not election. We need a new governance framework in the US. I believe it’s genuinely silly to think this type of activity is limited to one party or one administration or that it is new.
I believe the Constitution and related artefacts should be stored in the British Museum with other historical documents. Civic religion needs to be done away with.
Well, local history in the US, judged by most current Americans, would probably say the current system is better than the previous one, and the current one spawned from a revolution. Maybe the second (third?) time it'll incrementally improve at least.
The current system is the result of hundreds of years of gradual democratization and economic development, not the revolution. For an example of the US without the American Revolution, look at Canada. They’re doing fine. Here in the US, the Revolution didn’t cause life to change at all for the vast majority of people.
Whether the majority of people believe that or not has more to do with the place of the Revolution in our national mythology than with what actually happened in reality.
The Revolution allowed a new system to be built, but it is a teleological fallacy to point to the current system as the result. Centuries of trial, error, and institutional hardening led to the system current Americans would judge.
The first post-revolution organizational system of the US, described in the Articles of Confederation, is very different than the difficult and contingent pivot to a federal system. Almost a million US citizens died in the transition.
"Almost every" is a very strong statement. But even granted that, the interregnum periods (civil wars and revolutions) tend to be so horrific that they are wise to avoid. In fact, people like Plato, Machiavelli, and Hobbes who lived through revolutions tended to come to the cynical conclusion that any system of government was better than a civil war. I don't agree with that conclusion, but I'd rather see the system reform itself than jump immediately to "tear up the constitution and start over"
No matter how much you hate Communists, you must admit the fall of the USSR was catastrophic in terms of quality of life and life expectancy. All the public goods and services were sold off en masse and children were driven to prostitution to avoid starvation.
~30 years later all the quick investors of the privatization run the country and have been sending all their able bodied men into a drone-based meat grinder with no end in sight.
Not GP, but I think there are a few things that could be done either through a complete re-write of the constitution or through amendments if that process somehow becomes tenable again.
1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
2. Re-write the first amendment to significantly limit political speech. The specifics of this are obviously very thorny, but reversing Citizens United and drastically limiting the amount of money that is spent on elections is necessary to have _any_ chance of saving the country.
1 is something I've been saying for a while. One rep for every 35k residents was the count at one point, right? I hear it's something like one for every 800k now. And constituency shouldn't be based on geography; if the most important issue to me is whatever, I should be able to fill my ranked-choice ballot with candidates that support Whatever. We can work out the mechanics, but the point would be to have a legislative body where each rep had 35k distinct names behind them.
2 is dicey and I would like to try campaign finance reform first.
I don't want to throw everything out because that's how you get slavery and The Handmaid's Tale. At the same time, I'll gladly acknowledge that a lot of our institutions were rotten from the founding and to their core, and their dismantling maybe not necessary but certainly suitable for a reborn America that leaves much of its baggage behind.
2 is campaign finance reform. The only meaningful campaign finance reform is going to come with limits on political speech. Otherwise you just get the same amount of spend with even more of it being funneled through PACs.
Campaign finance reform gets rid of private financing of PACs and Super PACS altogether. You might call that limiting speech, and I guess it is, in a way, but it's not a restriction for its own sake, but rather to emphasize that actual main reform: public financing (and necessarily limited).
> 1. Massively increase the size of congress. Modern technology makes this feasible in a way that it wasn't when the size was capped. More congress critters means it's harder to buy off a majority of them.
I agree with 1. 2 is more of a reform of current law rather than an amendment. I would like to see the 17th amendment repealed also. Capping representatives greatly skewed the distribution of power in congress. The balance of congressional power was harmed equally by making senators popularly elected instead of appointed by state legislatures to represent the state government.
I have accepted that a lot of effort has been put into making sure these people never see justice and they probably won't. I put my energy into strengthening democracy and institutions for the next generation so they have the opportunity to do better than we have.
You are completely right. There are no avenues to seek justice here because the levers of power control the justice. And if the holders of power change, they won't spend political capital on this kind of thing. It's free crime.
Realistically I think it will come down to the aggrieved counterparties here. Who was on the losing side of the money, was it Joe Schmoe day trader or a bunch of funds who lost their shirt?
If it’s the hedge funds or institutional money, you can absolutely be sure this will come to a head. People don’t like being taken for a ride, and if they are repeatedly taken for a ride and they are organized market participants they will come around and make sure there is a comeuppance as a collective
Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state. Once the leadership of this current government is gone and nobody is around to protect the offenders then its time to swoop in with the records and the justice system.
This is why its risky to join corrupt political movements led by old men, because they will use you to break the law, then die and you'll be on the hook. Much like the people who worked for the Soviets in the Baltics post war as young staffers, who administered the forced deportations and were eventually prosecuted ~50 years later for genocide or crimes against humanity.
i.e. everyone working for ICE today should be agitating for a pardon, given how racial profiling and warrentless raids are probably rather illegal in the long run.
> Record and wait. Justice is slow but has the power of the nation state.
this is pretty much how things will unfold in USA. Everything that has to happen will happen but very slowly. There is all the evidence supporting that.
Partly why I'm against anybody over retirement age taking office even if it is a heavy handed approach and could be seen as age discrimination.
The odds are too low of anybody getting meaningfully punished while they get to openly setup their entire family for generations using means and information not available to any normal citizen.
And while not guaranteed they are statistically more likely to suffer age related cognitive decline while still in office.
They should be banned from trading or accepting any money whatsoever and be forced to divest from all assets.
And then to compensate they should be paid more in terms of salary, even if that salary seems absurdly large it would be less than most of them gain from the insider info they use to make deals.
Take the median income, multiply it by 5-10 and thats their salary.
There could also be a requirement for them to buy and hold (for a predetermined length of time) broad index funds that match the US Total Stocks and US Total Bond markets. They would only make money if the US as a whole makes money. It would certainly help with aligning motivations.
The thing with justice is that when you look past it in one place, you don’t really get to ask for it in another. I’m talking about Gaza - it set the precedent that the U.S. and its client state, Israel, can get away with anything. Nothing is out of bounds, criminality is normalized, and accountability is dependent on the identity of the victim. Now that the victims are people affected by the stock market manipulation (people in the West), suddenly we’re interested in justice.
I think one of the things that goes unmentioned in these discussions is that while the US gets a lot of attention for this kind of activity, it has also (historically) been in the forefront of criminalization and prosecution. I may be wrong, but don't know of any other jurisdiction that prosecuted insider trading before the Eighties, and the US has had a pattern of investigating and regulating this since the 30s.
I don't think that this is a particular form of exceptionalism, beyond the US having a longer tradition of widespread, retail-owned shares, and law-making around that fact.
But sometimes I wonder when people are criticising the US as a culture, they're often choosing as the baseline that should be respected standards that were also defined in a US cultural context. What this sometimes means is that in internal US culture these points are seen as something that is heavily discussed, because there was a point where it was democratically decided and therefore could be undecided in the same way, like corporate personhood, or money-as-speech. In the case of the criminalization "insider trading", there is lively debate about whether this is actually a "good thing". That can sound horrific externally, because of course insider trading is a bad thing. But someone decided to make that a bad thing, and -- for historical accident reasons -- the edges of that debate was largely defined within the US.
(This is mostly just barely-informed speculation: sometimes issues like this emerge in international fora, or start in another culture and quickly spread. But the cultural and financial dominance of the US in the last century or so really makes these things often a point of debate in American terms, and a fixed point elsewhere. I speak here as an immigrant to the US and also someone who is dipped in global policy work, rather than someone who is stating this as a good or a bad thing.)
A lot of the United States historical influence and soft power comes from it being a nation of rules and laws. The credibility of the country provided a perception that it was a stable place to store value (investment in treasuries, greenbacks, etc). When the government is facilitating insider trading out in the open (repeatedly), we’re losing a lot more than money due to fraud.
Congressional hearings combined with SEC regulatory incursions.
There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
FYI it may not be technically illegal it depends on all sorts of things.
If trade were made public it could be very damaging.
> There will never be an investigation while Trump is president, but, it's entirely feasible to force some action in the time being to enable a case later.
And realistically we don't want that. Similar with Kristi Noem, Pam Bondi, better to sit on things until Trump is out of office, so there can be no pardon.
Elections elected Trump twice, so what other strategy should Americans try next?
Americans have been a democracy for 200 years and have no healthcare, no public transit, a crippling drug and homeless problem, a crippling gun violence problem... The list goes on. Democracy doesn't seem to be having the desired affect there.
Why should that suddenly change? Where's this hope coming from?
Most of this intransigence is due to corruption, starting with a billionaire cabal’s influence over the supreme court. Citizens United has all but granted the power to decide elections to super PACs, and therefore to the billionaire donor class.
Unfortunately with 90% of broadcast television soon to be owned by a single family, overturning this corrupt power may be even more difficult.
I think it’s time for society as a whole to reconsider the social contract legitimizing the wealth of these oligarchs.
Elections are already being used for collectively applying "justice", just not the type that stops corruption. Instead it's right wing mob "justice" against the woke and immigrants and all the liberal tears are the prize the braying mob that voted for autocracy wants and they're happy to accept corruption as long as they don't think it affects them. Democracy is the worst form of government, except for all types we've tried.
The framers of the constitution acknowledged the flaws and vulnerabilities of democracy and cited education as a prevention mechanism for an ill informed population voting against their own best interest. It’s no coincidence that public education has been under constant assault from the right since Reagan.
Getting rid of the delusion of American exceptionalism in how politics is conducted. In other words, do something about the two party system, or the pardon power or any number of things, the possibilities are endless. But doing anything about it would require admitting that the USA is something other than perfect, so it’ll never happen. Too bad really.
At least the USA is only 4% of the world’s population so the world economy will just find other financial hubs and currencies, no big loss.
lol, others are saying elections to solve economic concerns. If that solves it why do you keep re-electing Republicans given this context: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/U.S._economic_performance_by_p... sure the next election might fix it temporarily but the one after that will just just tank the economy again. Or overturn insider trading bans or issue pardons, the possibilities for chaos are endless and — fun fact - investors abhor regulatory uncertainty.
Why do we? You say this as if the country is a single organism and in lock step with the current administration. I have never voted for a republican in my life and never will, but now, somehow, all 350 million Americans just fit into one big bucket?
Because at this point all the people in all the other countries do not care who you voted for, especially not after he caused an insurrection and a Democratic Party administration didn't do anything to prosecute that. At this point all the people outside the US just want to know what you're going to be doing about this insanity.
Didn’t vote for him. Doing whatever we can to get out of the situation. The United States is not a single organism. It’d be like blaming the French for Victor Orban because both countries are in Europe. Sorry for being born somewhere and sorry for the bad weather lately.
For starters, you're not alone in this feeling. A lot of us are very hungry for justice, and a lot of the Trump administrations current tactics are openly grappling with the reality of jailtime and restitution if they lose power. These are unusual times, and so people who are not usually inclined toward retribution are hungry for it.
That said, it's hard to reconcile that with the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done. And even in the best case scenario, we wouldn't expect Trump himself to live long enough to face much justice.
The optimism left in me hopes that this era can serve as an enduring cautionary tale for future societies.
>the fact that Democrats continue to be the opposition party, and failed to even imprison Trump over four years for the things he'd done
I'd like to point out it was NOT the Democrats who failed us, it was Republicans in congress who failed us. I'm really not sure how you can suggest Democrats failed us, when they had 2 successful impeachments against trump, but it was Senate Republicans that voted to not remove him when 60 votes were required in a Senate split 50/50. Every single Republican Senator except Mitt Romney in the first impeachment failed us. The second impeachment for insurrection got closer at 57 votes in the senate, but Republicans failed us again.
Democrats absolutely did not fail us, they were the ones trying to hold a criminal accountable. It was and always is Republicans who fail us.
I want to clarify my framing. In the same way one might say their goalie failed them, and not that the enemy who struck the ball failed them.
My phrasing that Dems "failed us" reduces politics to a "my team versus enemy team" framing, and I'd add more nuance if I were to express it in longer form. But I don't want to get in the habit of writing purely about politics here.
I understand the feeling, but I'd appreciate if my off-the-cuff feelings about the capabilities of one political party was not articulated as a bad-faith intentional rewriting of the historical record.
My correction was more for everyone else reading, and not specifically you.
Far too often the Democrats have been called out for "failing us" or other both-sides nonsense (not saying you did that here), when in reality they are the only viable choice (capable of winning elections, don't get me started on 3rd parties) to actually fix the calamity the Republicans always cause.
Describing them as "failing" is always going to trigger me. They've done a great job in every single hearing and debate at spelling out exactly how craven the Republicans are - if people just aren't listening and describe them as "failing", then that's a problem. They've done amazing work. The people that really failed us are the voters, but more specifically the people who just didn't show up to vote because they think the Democrats are losers, which is how "failing us" sounds to someone reading random comment threads.
The Democratic Party isn’t without its own corruption either. Pelosi is one of the best stock traders ever and there’s a reason why people voted for Trump. The border being open was criminal negligence and this isn’t just a conservative talking point cities like Seattle near the Canadian border were maxed out on services the could provide to migrants. Across the board our politicians are corrupt rule breakers, it doesn’t matter if one is worse than the other. Neither party can really prosecute the other fully because both need to see their leadership held to account and are terrified of that door opening.
> it doesn’t matter if one is worse than the other.
I disagree with this, I think things which are worse are worse. This is orders of magnitude worse, and it is impacting my life more..
To keep things focused on the tech industry, a lot of our security is ultimately built on trust (Google and Apple won't ship malicious apps, CAs, etc) and this corruption erodes that trust.
Mass immigration may not have effected you but it did greatly effect millions in the blue collar and service labor market and generally speaking was a human rights nightmare for millions of people who were trafficked, exploited and abused by a system of corrupt politicians, NGOs and crime organizations. What’s “worse” is irrelevant when it depends entirely on who you ask
I made a face, reading this article. They present the US gov't's very large and scary liabilities and future obligations, but they don't present the other side of the picture, the future income streams. (How much can the US government realistically expect to earn annually via taxation?)
Without being able to compare future liabilities to future income, we're lacking critical context. It's like they wrote half an article; kinda frustrating.
There is no feasible scenario where tax revenues will allow the US government to pay a 39 Trillion, soon to be 40 Trillion debt. And paying the debt its not even in discussion right now.
What is in discussion, are the multiple, very feasible, and very realistic scenarios, where an increase in interest rates, and a run from the dollar...Will force the US government to spend over 80% of the tax revenue, JUST TO SERVICE the debt interest....
I am not an economist but my worry is that government deficit spending was the largest driving factor for the bull run. Balance the budget and the economy crashes.
Zero when the president has the power to issue blanket pardons to his family and inner circle. Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.
> Hell, he might even extend it fully to ICE. There's precedent too since the previous president pardoned his son for all crimes committed over a period of time.
I love how people pretend this established some new kind of precedent.
Y'all keep forgetting Nixon.
"Now, Therefore, I, Gerald R. Ford, President of the United States, pursuant to the pardon power conferred upon me by Article II, Section 2, of the Constitution, have granted and by these presents do grant a full, free, and absolute pardon unto Richard Nixon for all offenses against the United States which he, Richard Nixon, has committed or may have committed or taken part in during the period from January 20, 1969 through August 9, 1974."
Well, then we'll just have a situation where texas and Florida are safe havens for these people, and the governor will refuse to extradite them to New York or whatever to face trial
I keep getting stuck on the liability problem of this supposed "new world". If we take this as far as it goes: AI agent societies that designs, architects, and maintains the entire stack E2E with little to no oversight. What happens when rogue AIs do bad things? Who is responsible? You have to have fireable senior engineers that understand deep fundamentals to make sure things aren't going awry, right? /s
This is really cool -- pedantically, I've always thought "full spectrum" is actually misleading from a traditional photographic sense. Like IR + visible light + UV != full spectrum. I'd love to see post-processed imagery of every-day life through an extended view of broader EM energy (similar to astrophotography)... like what does a city scene look like with x-rays and microwaves included?
Side note: have always loved this image https://imgur.com/NZjWfWT of rainbows with UV and IR visible.
Author here. I agree with you, "full spectrum" is a generous marketing phrase for what might more accurately be called _extended_ spectrum.
People way smarter than me have been able to achieve DIY spatial imaging with x-rays via compressed sensing [1] and with microwaves via phased arrays [2].
Optical wavelengths seem to be at a sweet spot of good angular resolution, varied natural sources, and harmless to humans.
You'd obviously have to use false-color, as most modern astronomy pictures do (even the ones that use visible tend to pump the saturation UP!).
However, the amount of light from the sun drops off exponentially away from the peak at green-blue (yellow-green, after atmospheric filtering). You'd also have to really fake the dynamic range a lot to get it to look any different from IR+Vis+NUV. (If there was 0.001% as much x-ray light as there is, say, red light, DNA could only exist in the lightless depths of the ocean.)
So, it would look like an IR+Vis photo (light falls off pretty fast in the UV, too), except the ones you've seen oversell the IR.
So it would look like a Vis-light photo, with slightly shinier objects in it.
I like distinguishing "light" (physical world) from "color" (species-specific biology). Sunbeam blue light is already less intense than NIR-I, but human bio juices the blue. Most humans are bright-light trichromats and low-light monochromats. Rod sensitivity is 3 orders of magnitude up, with single-ish photon sensitivity. Some amphibians have an extra rod type, for low-light bichromaticity. Some deep-sea fish are bright mono and dark lotschromats (12+ rod opsins). So why not imagine seeing the world with a triple (or more) of short-wavelength super-rods, a few orders of magnitude more sensitive still, with whatever curves seem fun? Perhaps curves naturally selected for by "makes intriguing images of the world for social media"...
If you specify the source used for lighting, e.g. solar light, you can define precisely what "full spectrum" photography is, i.e. recording a bandwidth large enough so that any lighting energy that falls outside that range is negligible.
Playing with a hyper-spectral imager makes you rethink how we see things. I've talked about this before, but human vision essentially "low resolution" on the spectral bands. Using an HSI that "sees" in 4nm spectral slices from 350-1000nm is really interesting (Cubert Ultris X20 Plus). There's so much spectral information that we just totally miss. I really wish the equipment for capturing images at these higher spectral resolutions wasn't so expensive so we could see people experimenting with them on a large scale. The one I got to work with was more than a nice SUV and that's cheap in the space. The ones we looked at from Headwall that did something like 400-2500nm started at $250k. Those weren't even full-frame imagers like the Ultris, they were line scanning imagers. That massive cost jump was down to the fact that from ~1050nm+ you need much different hardware to capture spectral data.
If anyone is interested in some technical aspects of the "full frame" HSI I worked with, it's quite interesting. It had a 20MP Monochromatic Sensor that captured single-band 12-bit data behind an array of lenses that split the incoming spectral range (350-100nm) into 164 individual 4nm wide bands of light that hit 410x410px squares on the sensor. The sensor can capture from 350-1100, but the QE drops of really fast past about 850nm and the product limited the upper range to 1000nm. I'm sure I munged something there, but you should get the general idea. I highly recommend researching the space of HSI, it's fascinating.
Last thing to point out, when working with an HSI like this, one thing you can do is capture a "spectral fingerprint". Since you've gone from three bands on spectral intensity information to, in our case, 164 bands you have the ability to turn that high-density spectral data for each pixel into essentially a line graph. Using that information you can do matching against a database of known spectral fingerprints and identify materials and material properties really well. In the multi-spectra world you'll see this capability used to identify crop health. In the hyperspectral world you can identify so much more. For instance, it can see skin anomalies that aren't visible to the human eye. You can identify specific minerals in a picture of a bunch of rocks (you need up into the 2500nm range for this though). You can easily spot foreign objects on a conveyor of food items. Overall, it's a long list of capabilities and I'm certain there are many more uses we could discover if the imagers were cheaper. And if you are into the wider ML world (not just focused on LLMs I mean), you'll see ML Classification Models being trained on these spectral fingerprints as well.
Anyway, the "full-spectrum" is fascinating, especially when you are able to slice it thin.
This one hurt.
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